Toxic Waste

LAWRENCE SUMMERS’S MEMO

BASEL CONVENTION AND BASEL BAN AMENDMENT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The safe disposal of toxic waste has become a global challenge. Each year, world nations produce 440 million tons of toxic waste. This is a highly conservative estimate, given the clandestine nature of the enterprise and fluid definitions of what constitutes hazardous or toxic waste (the terms are used interchangeably). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines hazardous waste as “a waste with properties that make it dangerous or potentially harmful to human health or the environment” (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2006). Hazardous waste can be liquids, solids, contained gases, sludge, byproducts of manufacturing processes, or simply discarded commercial products, like cleaning fluids or pesticides.

An international trade has arisen to transfer toxic waste from developed to developing nations. The United Kingdom exported spent mercury to South Africa throughout the 1990s, which claimed at least three lives at a mercury recycling plant, where mercury is removed from waste sludge for reuse. Similarly, the U.S. chemical firm Holtrachem Manufacturing attempted to export 260,000 pounds of spent mercury waste from its U.S. plant in Maine to India in September 2000. The U.S. government defined the spent mercury as a metal with trade value and exempted it from regulations on waste exports. Pressured by environmental advocacy groups, the Indian government refused the shipment and returned it to the United States.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS’S MEMO

Some leaders of global financial institutions have offered economic rationale for trade in toxic waste between developed and developing countries. On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, who served as chief economist at the World Bank, wrote an internal memo that stated the World Bank should “be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs,” referring to less developed countries (Vallette 1999). His argument was threefold: First, “a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages.” Second, as “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.” Third, “the concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate [sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand” (Vallette 1999). After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil’s secretary of the environment, José Lutzenberger, wrote to Summers: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane” (Vallette 1999). Lutzenberger was forced from office shortly afterward.

As indicated in Summers’s memo, according to the Trade and Environment Database,

poor African nations have served as the dumping ground for toxic hazardous waste materials, i.e. raw sewage, sludge, incinerated ashes, contaminated oils, chemical substances, acids, poisonous solvents ejected by chemical, pharmaceutical and fertilizer producing plants in the industrialized world. … Uncontrolled dumping of toxic wastes in Africa has been traced back to the early 1970s, when reports of clandestine deals between African countries and companies in the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, and the former U.S.S.R. began surfacing (Trade and Environment Database 1996).

The worst victims of this waste shipment have been the African nations of Benin, Nigeria, and Somalia, which became a tempting target for cost-conscious waste traders. On average, the cost of processing toxic waste is as high as $3,000 per ton in industrialized countries, whereas it drops to $5 per ton in developing countries, according to the Trade and Environment Database. In 1987 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) adopted the Cairo Guidelines and Principles for the Environmentally Sound Management of Hazardous Waste, which require toxic-waste exporters to ensure that disposal sites in waste-importing countries meet the safety requirements of national and international regulations.

BASEL CONVENTION AND BASEL BAN AMENDMENT

Two years after the UNEP adopted the Cairo Guidelines, the leaders of 118 governments met in the Swiss town of Basel in 1989 and signed the first-ever global treaty regarding toxic waste, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. As of November 2006, more than 165 countries had ratified it to become international law. The Basel Convention was resented by waste-exporting industries and world governments, however, and they tried to cripple its enforcement. To prevent such efforts, the Basel Convention was amended to ban the trade in toxic waste with immediate effect. In all, 83 countries signed on to the 1995 amendment to the Basel Convention, which is now known as the Basel Ban Amendment. This amendment criminalizes all toxic-waste exports from member nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to non-OECD countries, even for recycling. According to the Basel Action Network, more than 90 percent of toxicwaste exports from OECD to non-OECD countries were meant for recycling.

Interestingly, the United States, which is the single largest producer of toxic waste, has ratified neither the Basel Convention nor the Basel Ban Amendment. The country’s refusal rests on the argument that U.S. laws effectively regulate toxic-waste exports. It is true that the United States has one of the toughest legal regimes to protect the environment, including the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or Superfund Act, of 1986. These legal regimes, however, ensure safe disposal of toxic waste only within the United States, and their impact is diluted in regulating waste exports outside the country.

Even the Basel Convention and the Basel Ban Amendment are marred by several loopholes that allow the toxic-waste trade to continue. Some nations try to circumvent the ban on toxic-waste exports by resorting to bilateral agreements, which they argue fall outside the purview of the Basel Ban Amendment. Japan, which is the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, signed bilateral economic partnership agreements (EPAs) in the early 2000s with Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines to evade the ban on toxic-waste exports. These EPAs list hazardous wastes as tariff barriers, which Japan believes need be eliminated. Japan is also using free trade agreements to promote free trade in hazardous wastes. Similarly, some governments and industries attempt to nullify the banned designations of toxic wastes under the Basel Convention under one pretext or another, or define them down to continue toxic-waste exporting. The ultimate enforcers, however, are individual governments that allow waste imports. They can defeat international legislation on toxic-waste trade by being lax in the enforcement of the Basel Ban Amendment for short-term economic gains. A vigorous civic engagement by national and international public interest groups is, therefore, crucial to hold the governments of waste-importing countries to their commitments to halt trade in toxic waste. More important, clean production, minimum waste generation, and waste management within the national limits of waste-producing countries can bring an end to the global trade in toxic waste.

SEE ALSO Disease; Environmental Kuznets Curves; Love Canal; Public Health; Resources; World Bank, The

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basel Action Network. 1998. Why the U.S. Must Ratify the Entire Basel Convention (or Not at All). Briefing Paper No. 2. Seattle, WA: Basel Action Network. http://ban.org/Library/briefing2.html.

Basel Action Network. 1999. The Basel Ban: A Triumph for Global Environmental Justice. Briefing Paper No. 1. Seattle, WA: Basel Action Network. http://ban.org/Library/briefing1.html.

Clapp, Jennifer. 2002. Seeping through the Regulatory Cracks: The International Transfer of Toxic Waste. SAIS Review 22 (1): 141–155.

Japanese Citizen Groups Joint Statement. 2007. Japanese Citizen Groups Urge the Japanese Government to Remove Wastes from EPAs with Developing Countries and to Seek National Self-Sufficiency in Waste Management. February 11. http://www.ban.org/Library/070211_letter.html.

Knight, Danielle. 2000. Outcry over U.S. Toxic Chemical Shipment to India. Inter Press Service, December 11. http://www.ban.org/ban_news/outcry.html.

Knight, Danielle. 2001. Controversy around Mercury Shipment from U.S. to India. Inter Press Service, January 25. http://ban.org/ban_news/controversy.html.

Kockott, Fred. 1994. Wasted Lives: Mercury Waste Recycling at Thor Chemicals. Waste Trade Study No. 4. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Greenpeace International and Earthlife Africa.

Trade and Environment Database. 1996. Africa Waste Trade. Case No. 315. http://www.american.edu/TED/oauwaste.htm.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 2006. Hazardous Waste. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/osw/hazwaste.htm.

Vallette, Jim. 1999. Larry Summers’ War against the Earth. New York: Global Policy Forum. http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/summers.htm.

Tarique Niazi

CLEANING UP TOXIC WASTE

A Problem of Plenty

During the 1980s the people of the United States lived a life of comfort unheralded in human history for so large and diverse a people. Astonishing advances in technology were largely responsible for the nation's material success. The country's comparative affluence had, however, a major side effect: pollution. From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution the country's factories, chemical plants, and even (beginning with the use of manmade chemical fertilizers and insecticides) the nation's farms were culpable. While producing an expansive profusion of goods for market, the nation's economy had also been pouring vast quantities of pollutants into the soil, water, and air.

Superfund

In 1980 Congress established the Super-fund to clean up toxic waste dumps across the country. The Superfund was only one part of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), but CERCLA was judged an awkward acronym, and the law was commonly referred to as the Superfund Act of 1980.The Superfund provided three essential things in the fight against toxic waste sites: it put the federal government in charge of identifying public sites; it provided for fines to be levied on chemical manufacturers to assist in funding the cleanup; and it held companies that had contributed to a toxic site, how-ever large or small their contribution to the total pollution present, liable. The new act initially provided more than $1 billion for a Hazardous Substance Response Trust Fund, but it was soon clear that even this amount might not be enough to clean up the tons of toxic chemicals buried and abandoned in sites scattered all across America. There were 1,224 sites on the Superfund inventory list of toxic dump sites in need of cleanup by mid 1989. Conversely, during the 1980s only twenty-seven sites had been cleaned so thoroughly that they were removed from the Superfund list of hazardous sites.

Superfund Expanded

A series of amendments to CERCLA in 1986 increased the public's legal right to information from corporations. The 1986 revisions gave the public access to industrial data on the use of chemicals in industry. The information corporations supply must, according to the law, describe the toxicity of the chemicals they use and the manner in which the companies are disposing of them. Large users of chemicals are required by the law to file annual Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reports with the EPA. The 1986 amendments also increased funding of the Superfund. The new federal funding of $9.6 billion was a substantial increase from the 1980 provision of $1.6 billion, but many environmental organizations were estimating that the actual costs might run to over $100 billion. By 1987, however, a contingent of Environmental Protection Agency analysts were asserting that toxic dumps were overrated as a danger to the environment. In their view ozone depletion and naturally occurring radon were much greater risks to public health.

Corporate Responsibility

By 1989 the federal Super-fund had $8.5 billion for cleanup of toxic sites. It was also increasingly wielding an important provision of the 1980 Superfund Act: the provision authorizing the government to bring suit against the corporations responsible for creating the toxic sites. Using this proviso, federal bureaucrats were able to alleviate some of the taxpayers' burden. Further, the very creation of the Superfund Act had inspired corporate action: striving to keep their companies off the Superfund list, many corporations initiated investigations and cleanup efforts on their own. Indeed, with public attention and concern focused on air, water, and land pollution, companies began to voluntarily reduce the amounts of pollutants they spewed into the environment. In 1987 the Monsanto Corporation vowed to reduce its air pollution emissions by 90 percent, and other companies such as Union Carbide and Du Pont also set out to reduce the pollutants they released into the environment. Lastly, though governmental fines associated with a Superfund site were modest, the repercussions of being declared a responsible party for polluting a site could, in civil court, be enormous. Private liability lawsuits often followed quickly on the heals of modest Environmental Protection Agency fines. For example, Xerox was fined $95,000 by the EPA for failing to report chemical pollutants at one site. The company, however, suffered $4.75 million in losses to two families who sued them as a result.

The Problem of Pollution

The Superfund was made necessary because chemicals had been disposed of inappropriately for decades. The symbol in the 1980s of the toxic waste site was Love Canal, a section of Niagara Falls, New York, used as a dump site by a chemical and plastics company in the 1940s and 1950s. The company had dumped nearly twenty thousand tons of toxic pollutants in improperly sealed metal drums into the empty canal and covered over the barrels with earth. Subsequently, the company donated the land to the city of Niagara Falls. Houses and an elementary school were built at the dump site. By the 1970s local children suffered from a variety of disorders, including malformed bones, retardation, cleft palates, and kidney disease. The unusually high rate of birth defects, miscarriages, and cancers in the area were blamed on the discarded chemicals, which had leached into the soil from leaking barrels. Love Canal, however, was only the most publicly visible toxic site. Also infamous as the nation's worst polluted areas during the 1980s were "cancer alley" outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and two West Virginia valleys. By 1983 the fifty worst hazardous waste sites on the Superfund's National Priorities List included the municipalities of Jacksonville, Arkansas; New Castle County, Dela-ware; Swartz Creek, Michigan; Bridgeport, New Jersey; and Kent, Washington. One of the largest Superfund sites was twenty-seven square miles of Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver, Colorado. Every region of the nation was affected.

The Fix

Agents of the Environmental Protection Agency declared "toxic-sub stance emergencies" at many of the more than twelve hundred identified toxic waste sites during the 1980s. The declaration of an emergency did not, however, mean that the government was swift to act. Often, little more was done than fencing off the sites and posting notices that they were hazardous. When the EPA actively pursued cleanup of a toxic waste site they often chose between a series of expensive options, including cap and contain, a process whereby packed clay is used to cap the polluted area; the incineration of contaminated soils; chemically "washing" soils to remove contaminants and then collecting the runoff; and removal of the soil to one of the few government-approved toxic waste storage sites. Another option was to improve the laws so that pollution is stopped before it starts, as in a 1984 law calling for a strict "land ban" on PCBs and dioxins. Such chemicals, Congress decreed, must be destroyed by incineration or chemical neutralization.

Source:

"Yesterday's Toxics: Superfund," Newsweek, 114 (24 July 1989): 36-38.

toxic waste is waste material, often in chemical form, that can cause death or injury to living creatures. It usually is the product of industry or commerce, but comes also from residential use, agriculture, the military, medical facilities, radioactive sources, and light industry, such as dry cleaning establishments. The term is often used interchangeably with "hazardous waste," or discarded material that can pose a long-term risk to health or environment. Toxics can be released into air, water, or land. In 1976 the Toxic Substances Control Act required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate potentially hazardous industrial chemicals, including halogenated fluorocarbons, dioxin, asbestos , polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and vinyl chloride. Other federal legislation pertaining to hazardous wastes includes the Atomic Energy Act (1954), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or Superfund Act (1986). Toxic waste treatment and control has proved to be expensive and time-consuming with more resources spent on court battles than on actual cleanup. The disposal of toxic wastes is also a topic of international concern. In 1989, some 50 countries signed a treaty aimed at regulating the international shipment of toxic wastes. In some cases such wastes are shipped to developing countries for cheap disposal without the informed consent of their governments. The often substandard shipping, storage, and treatment methods endanger human health and the health of the environment. See air pollution ; pollution ; solid waste ; water pollution .